Balm in Gilead
by Rose Maylie
Summary: An AU glimpse of how things may really have turned out for Casey and Zeke.


_Author's Note: A fellow fanfic writer, _Faculty_ fan and conspiracy-theory enthusiast recently told me about her idea for an alternate universe ending (and continuation) of the _Faculty_ storyline. In her AU, no one in authority believes the story about the aliens. Stan, Stokely and Delilah decide to play it safe and say they just got stoned and got out of control. Zeke earns a prison sentence for possession of an illegal handgun and for running a drug lab out of his garage. And Casey—well, poor Casey doesn't quite know what's good for him, and insists on telling the truth, which lands him in a mental institution. The happy ending we see to the movie is little more than the medicated hallucinations Casey has in the asylum. But darker forces are at work, and Casey's institutionalization is in the service of those who may _really_ have been responsible for what happened at Herrington High. As she envisioned it, Casey is eventually released to his parents, but only after his mind has been almost gutted by these shadowy figures.  
  
I loved her concept and wrote this short story in keeping with her thrilling idea that Zeke, after being released from prison, finds out what has happened to Casey and rescues him, taking him on the run from those who would use him—and Zeke—for their own ends. This story takes place about a month after Zeke has taken Casey from his parents' home.   
  
Thanks go to my friend for firing my imagination!  
  
No slash; rated PG-13 for mild profanity._

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Balm in Gilead

  
Zeke was awakened by a light in his face. Barely awake and confused, he lay with his eyes shut, trying to remember where he was. A name came to him…Gilead. Gilead, Nebraska. He was in a motel on the outskirts of Gilead, Nebraska, which had itself seemed to be on the outskirts of absolutely nothing. In a motel in Gilead. In bed. By himself.   
  
It was the awareness of being alone in bed that finally made his eyes snap open. _Casey?_ he thought, feeling a shiver of fear in his stomach.   
  
Zeke saw Casey as soon as he opened his eyes, but the fear did not leave him, it only changed into a different sort of fear, one that felt more like sorrow, tinged with anger. Looking at Casey seemed to have that effect on Zeke, at least most of the time it did.   
  
Casey was standing by the window. He had pulled back the moldy motel curtain, and the sickly yellow light from the motel porch fell into the room. Zeke could see the flaking paint on the porch roof; beyond that he could see the dim light from the motel's office, now closed for the night. Beyond that lay nothing but the endless darkness of the plain.   
  
"Casey?" Zeke said, but Casey didn't answer. He was leaning heavily against the window, his forehead and left hand pressed flat against the glass. Zeke could see the outline of vapor that his warm hand left on the cold window. Casey's lips were moving, but Zeke could not hear him. His breath misted on the glass. His eyes were emerald-green in the yellow light, emerald-green and vacant.   
  
_Godamnit, he's gone off again._ Zeke thought, but his anger was not at Casey. _He was okay this afternoon. He was okay, he was talking and everything. He knew where he was_. _He knew _who_ he was_.   
  
Every time Casey had one of his lucid periods, Zeke felt hopeful and this afternoon had been one of the longest yet. Casey had been alert and talkative. He had sung along with the radio. Not once had that haunted, distant look come into his face, the one that meant he was retreating back into the darkness of his mind, into the craters that they had carved into his brain in that place. He had even managed to stay awake long enough to watch a little television before falling asleep on Zeke's shoulder. But now he was standing by the cold window, ghostly in his white shorts and t-shirt, empty-eyed and talking to himself.   
  
"Casey, man, " Zeke said gently. "Come back to bed. It's freezing out there."  
  
Casey only closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead against the glass in a gesture of negation. His mouth worked slowly and now Zeke could hear him.  
  
"Who is that?" Casey whispered. "Who is that, there's no one there. There's no one there's no one there's no one."   
  
Zeke could see Casey shivering. It really _was_ freezing in the room; the old window-box heater was putting forth an anemic stream of warm air, but it wasn't enough to compete with the chill of a November night on the plains. _Go and get him_, Zeke thought. _Go and get him before he gets sick, and then what will you do?  
  
_Casey had already been sick once since that day a month ago when Zeke had loaded him into his car, actually _loaded_ him in, like a sack of groceries, because Casey had barely been able to walk on his own. Zeke hadn't really had any idea of what he was doing, but he had known that he couldn't leave Casey the way he was. Lying on top of the bedspread with that stoned expression on his face, his vacant eyes wandering around the room, and all the while, Casey's mom saying "He's so much better now, he's a little better every day," with such forced cheer that Zeke had wanted to lay her skull open, had wanted to cut her damn head off the way he had almost cut off Mr. Furlong's.   
  
Casey's mom had gone downstairs to make coffee, and how she could sit there and blithely drink coffee while her beautiful, bright son had been reduced to this broken thing that could barely keep its eyes open, Zeke would never know. But he did know, instantly, that he wasn't leaving that house without Casey. Thinking fast, he had jammed some of Casey's clothes into a plastic grocery bag that had been on the floor, barely looking at what he was taking. _Winter things_, he remembered thinking. _It'll be winter soon and we're not coming back here, we're never coming back.  
  
_Zeke had lifted Casey in his arms, feeling almost sick at how light the kid was, how light and limp, almost boneless. Casey's head had lolled backward and he had moaned in protest.   
  
"Don't worry, Case, we're just gonna take a little trip," Zeke had whispered desperately. _Please don't start crying, Casey!_ "You'll like this trip, I promise."   
  
Casey had muttered something and for just a moment his eyes had focused on Zeke, and Zeke thought he had seen recognition there, a spark of the real Casey that must still live inside his addled mind.   
  
Then it had been down the stairs, past the kitchen where Mrs. Connor was putting cookies on a plate. _Enjoy your coffee, bitch,_ Zeke had thought furiously, before he was out the door and strapping Casey into the shotgun seat. Casey had said nothing, had not made another sound, but Zeke thought he had known what was happening; at least, something resembling a smile had twitched at the pale corners of his mouth when the engine had fired into life, when Zeke had peeled out of the driveway and gone tearing down Elm Street without a look back.   
  
But for days after that, Casey had not smiled at all. He had been sick, withdrawing from the cocktail of drugs they'd had him on, and Zeke had cursed himself for not thinking enough to have taken them with him so that he could have weaned Casey off slowly. But Casey had been forced to go cold turkey, lying in the back seat, shivering and puking and begging Zeke to take him home, to give him his meds, to kill him, to please please please _do_ _something_. Zeke hadn't dared to check into a motel during those days—their trail had been too fresh and Casey's screaming and babbling had hardly made for a low profile. So Zeke had parked them at night in out-of-the way places, beneath overpasses and in abandoned lots, and he had sat in the back seat with Casey's head in his lap, spooning Pepsi into the boy's mouth while Casey stared at him and shuddered and sweated. At last a night had come when Casey had slept, truly _slept_, and when he had woken his eyes had been clear for the first time in days.  
  
Since then, Casey had been sick once, just a bad cold, the sort of thing that would have been nothing but an inconvenience if he had been a normal 18-year-old who could have just gone home after class and had a cup of Thera-Flu and gone to bed. But Casey had still been so weak and living out of Zeke's car wasn't exactly conducive to good health, and finally Zeke had needed to splurge and rent a motel room for a whole day so that Casey could sleep off his fever in a real bed. Casey had talked in his fever, had talked about Marybeth and about school, but also about the things that had happened to him in that hospital, and Zeke had listened to him with his hands balled into fists and tears of rage running down his face.   
  
And now Casey was standing at the window shivering, and if Zeke left him there for another second he might get sick again and it might be worse this time. Zeke sat up and swung his legs over the bed and was grateful he had left his socks on because the threadbare motel carpet under his feet was damn cold.  
  
He went to the window and put an arm around Casey's narrow shoulders.   
  
"Come on Casey, let's go."  
  
Casey tried to pull away and his gaze returned to the window as if he had seen something terribly important there. Zeke looked out the window and saw nothing but the sagging, flaky porch and the parking lot and the night. He wrapped his arm tighter around Casey and turned him away from the window.   
  
"I don't want to go, don't want to go with you," he whispered in a reedy, fearful voice.  
  
"It's me, Zeke," Zeke said, knowing how Casey got when he was like this, that he needed to be reminded of where he was and who was with him. "It's just Zeke, and we're just going back to bed."  
  
"Zeke?" Casey said, and he turned his face up to Zeke's.  
  
Christ, but the kid was beautiful, even now, hollow-eyed, scarecrow-thin and painted in toxic yellow light, and how was it that Zeke had known him since the first grade and had never noticed until the whole thing with Marybeth? He had always been just Casey, nerdy Casey, too short, too skinny, whose clothes never fit right and who seemed ill at ease in his own skin. Even his name, _Casey_, had been stupid, a girl's name, really, and Zeke remembered how the guys would chant it in the grammar school yard when they were gearing up for some especially hilarious torment like stomping on his lunch or throwing him into the girls' bathroom. He had never outgrown his lowly status, not through junior high and high school, and while other geeks and nerds had been forgotten as their faces cleared up or they lost weight or got contact lenses, Casey had remained everyone's favorite object of abuse. He was different from the other losers, and maybe it was his odd and unsettling beauty that made him different, that scared people a little, the way they might have been scared of a unicorn that had wandered into their midst. What does a bunch of dumb kids do with something so beautiful that they can't wrap their brains around its existence? Maybe they destroy it, the way they tried to destroy Casey with their vicious words and incessant bullying.   
  
But they _hadn't_ destroyed Casey, had they? Casey was strong, the strongest of them all, as it had turned out. The others had all backed down to save their own skins, had agreed to deny that such a creature as "Marybeth" had ever existed so that they could just get on with their lives. Even Zeke, who had always thought of himself as standing two steps above society, had finally agreed to shut his mouth about aliens and to do his time for the petty drug charge and leave it all behind him. Not Casey. He had told the truth almost up until the day he had been taken away, and while part of Zeke thought that had been unspeakably stupid, most of him thought it had been fiercely courageous. Casey had been the strongest.   
  
 "Yeah, Casey, it's me," Zeke answered. He turned and with one arm he drew the curtain on the ugly yellow light and the black night and then put both arms around Casey to walk him back to bed.  
  
"Where are we?" Casey asked.  
  
"Gilead, Nebraska. At least that's what the sign said."  
  
"Gilead…" Casey said faintly and then fell silent as Zeke laid him down, handling him as carefully as a child. He could see the shimmer of Casey's eyes in the light that leaked around the curtain.  
  
Zeke lay down next to Casey and pulled the blankets up over them. The blankets were musty and felt as if they hadn't been washed in a long time, but they were warm. Casey was still shivering. Zeke drew Casey against him and rubbed his back until the shivers stopped.  
  
Zeke thought that Casey had fallen asleep, but then Casey spoke and he sounded like himself again, not lost and confused as he had before. "Zeke…I'm sorry. I don't know what happens to me. I think I'm getting better, and then I…it's…"  
  
"Don't worry about it, man," Zeke said. He felt Casey's hair ruffle in the slight breath of his words. "It's nothing, go to sleep."  
  
"If you want to go, you know…if you want to go off on your own…it'd be okay. I'll be okay."  
  
Zeke closed his eyes tightly and reflexively pulled Casey closer. Even now the kid was strong, even now when there was so little of him left. He had abandoned Casey once, not being as strong as he was, but things were different now, and Zeke would not fail him again. Zeke bent his head and kissed Casey through his soft hair.  
  
"I'm not leaving you, Case. Not now. Never again."   
  
Casey responded with only a sigh. His body relaxed against Zeke's and his breathing slowed and deepened until Zeke knew he was asleep.   
  
"Never again," Zeke whispered into the darkness. He lay awake listening to the soft rhythm of Casey's breath, and thought about beauty and strength until he dozed and then slept. Outside, the wind blew over the dark plains and the pale light of limitless stars pierced the wintry sky.


End file.
